COMMENTARY
Don't hijack King's message

By Marcus Daniel

Forty years ago, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his brilliant "I Have a Dream" speech to hundreds of thousands of black and white supporters gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. In it he called on Americans to create a society in which all people (and specifically children) would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

The court action ordering Kamehameha Schools to admit a non-Hawaiian is denounced as another step in eroding Hawaiian rights. Jeff Widener • The Honolulu Advertiser

But have they? And what do they now mean?

The recent court ruling allowing a non-Hawaiian child, Brayden Mohica-Cummings, to attend Kamehameha Schools provides an interesting perspective on King's legacy and the continuing battle for racial justice in the United States. The ruling has sparked anger from Native Hawaiians, and others, who believe the school should be allowed to restrict its admissions to children of Hawaiian ancestry. And this, in turn, has provoked righteous indignation and cries of "racism" from members of the public, as well as the editorial column of this newspaper ("Attack the act, but not the boy at school" [Aug. 24, 2003] ).

Without making clear its position on the broader issues at stake, the Advertiser editorial compared Mohica-Cummings to Elizabeth Eckford, a young black girl in Arkansas who helped desegregate Little Rock High School in 1957. Any attacks on Mohica-Cummings, claimed the editorial, would be acts of bigotry and those guilty of them would be "as bad as the segregationist mob in Little Rock back in 1957."

A letter printed on the next page headlined "Racism / Actions harken back to the South of the 1950s" made the same point more strongly: "What's happening at Kamehameha Schools is the exact same thing," wrote its author, as white attacks on African Americans in the 1950s.

Both writers drew parallels between white Southerners and Native Hawaiians, and claimed for themselves the mantle of anti-racism, the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King Jr.

But are there really no differences between the situation in the South in the 1950s and the situation in Hawai'i today?

Well, how about these? Unlike some Southern whites, Hawaiians don't preside over a brutal system of racial apartheid that systematically strips all non-Hawaiians of political freedom, economic opportunity and human dignity. They don't lynch non-Hawaiians from palm trees in Waikiki to shut them up and keep them working hard at menial jobs, and they don't consign non-Hawaiian kids to cash-starved segregated schools and dead-end lives.

If Hawaiians did preside over such an inhuman system, then these commentators would have a point. But we all know the truth. Whatever the faults of Kamehameha Schools (elitism for starters), it wasn't created to deprive white people of educational opportunity; it was created to provide opportunity for Native Hawaiians who had been deprived of educational opportunities by whites!

Only to the willfully ignorant could such differences mean nothing. But in the resentful racial imagination of many American whites, the world is turned upside-down and whites become the "victims" of racial injustice. Any movement toward genuine racial equality that excludes them is experienced by whites as "discrimination," and the preservation of their own sense of "equality" and "opportunity" too often appears to require (and certainly represents no challenge to) the continued existence of inequality for others.

This is clearest in the debate on affirmative action, where many white Americans insist on the formality of "equal" treatment while willfully ignoring blatant and enduring racial inequality and injustice.

Hijacking the language of King to condemn efforts to create real racial justice has become commonplace, but posing as the latter-day equivalents of black civil rights activists represents a new low in racial mimicry, a bizarre kind of political black and white minstrelsy.

When King demanded a society without racial distinctions, he wasn't demanding a "colorblind" society in which race was disregarded. What King wanted, and the end to which all his actions and ideas were bent, was a society without racial inequality. (In fact he desired a society without economic inequality as well, but I'll leave this issue aside.)

As King understood better than almost anybody else, such a society, which he called a "beloved community," couldn't be built by pretending race didn't matter. It could be built only when Americans recognized the historical legacy of racism, slavery and segregation, and acknowledged the injustice and inequality that continued to restrict political freedom and economic opportunity for nonwhites.

If the recent controversy about Kamehameha Schools is any indication, the "beloved community" remains a good way off, and many white Americans remain as determined as ever to deny nonwhites — in this case, Native Hawaiians — real opportunity in the name of a fictitious "equal opportunity," that substitutes the shadow of equality for its substance.

It's an old trick, and King knew it well. Forty years on, not only have we failed to realize King's deeply human and humane vision of racial equality, but we're allowing his ideas to be invoked freely against the very people for whom he fought most passionately, the dispossessed.

All of us should feel a sense of shame about our complicity in such political shamelessness.

Marcus Daniel is an assistant professor of American history at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.